Consider the following statements about Narmada River
- It rises from Maikala range near Amarkantak in Madhya Pradesh.
- Hiran River and Orsang River are the major left bank tributariers of Narmada River
- The Dhuandhar Falls are located on the Narmada River in Bhedaghat.
Choose the incorrect statements:
- a) 2 and 3
- b) 2 only
- c) 1 only
- d) 1 and 2
Global Innovation Index (GII) 2022, was released by?
- a) World Economic Forum
- b) World Intellectual Property Organisation
- c) Yale and Columbia University
- d) World Bank
Which one of the following statements best reflects the issue with Burkina Faso, sometimes mentioned in the news?
- a) It is generally believed that Ebola virus originated here
- b) It is affected by maritime piracy
- c) It witnessed a second coup this year
- d) A permanent military base is set up here by China
CBI leads crackdown on cyber-enabled financial crimes
In a CBI-led operation, codenamed “Chakra”, against cyber enabled financial crimes, 105 places were searched throughout the country on Tuesday. The search was based on inputs from the FBI, Interpol, Canadian and Australian enforcement agencies. State police were also involved in Andaman & Nicobar Islands, Delhi, Chandigarh, Punjab and Assam.
This is the third such operation led by the CBI in the past few days. As part of a global crackdown code-named Operation Garuda against drug smuggling, searches were conducted in coordination with Interpol.
On September 24, the agency had carried out searches at 59 locations across 20 States and one Union Territory, as part of a drive against the circulation and sharing of Child Sexual Abuse Material.
Code-named “Megh Chakra”, the operation was launched on the inputs received from the Interpol’s Singapore Crime Against Children unit based on the information received from the New Zealand police.
2) Provide smokers option to switch to less harmful products, says CPPR :-
Kerala-based Centre for Public Policy Research (CPPR), an independent public policy organisation. It has urged the Union government to provide an alternative to cigarette smokers to switch to some less harmful products.
It said while being a harmful product in its own right, e-cigarettes are increasingly being recognised as a viable alternative to conventional cigarettes.
On the pretext of tobacco “epidemic”, the government of India imposed a blanket ban on the production, import, export, transport, sale, distribution, storage, and advertisement of electronic cigarettes with the passing of the Prohibition of Electronic Cigarettes (Production, Manufacture, Import, Export, Transport, Sale, Distribution, Storage and Advertisement) Act, 2019.
Many countries, including the UK, Canada and New Zealand which are widely considered leaders in tobacco control, have chosen the path of regulating less risky alternatives like Electronic Nicotine Delivery Systems (ENDS) thereby adding further strength to their tobacco control measures.
CPPR said the Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR) had recommended the prohibition of e-cigarettes in India owing to reasons like increased use by youth, harmful health effects and potential to convert users to smoking.
“Based on this, the Prohibition of Electronic Cigarettes Act, 2019 was enacted which prohibits e-cigarettes, where e-cigarettes have been defined to include all forms of ‘ENDS, Heat not Burn products, e-hookah and the like devices’.
This blanket definition is likely to create confusion as Heat not Burn (HNB) products differ from ENDS (which includes e-cigarettes). HNB products contain or use tobacco and not liquid nicotine (which is the case for ENDS and e-cigarettes), hence they should be governed and regulated as tobacco products,”
3)Explained The Nobel Prize in Physics 2022
The Nobel Prize in Physics 2022 was awarded jointly to Alain Aspect, John F. Clauser and Anton Zeilinger.
At the heart of the award is the concept of quantum entanglement, which Albert Einstein referred to as “spooky action at a distance.” The Prize has been given for experimental work in this area. Two of the laureates—John Clauser and Alain Aspect—worked on firming up this concept and developing more complex experiments that demonstrated this phenomenon, especially creating, processing and measuring what are called Bell pairs. The third laureate, Anton Zeilinger, has been chosen for his innovative use of entanglement and Bell pairs both in research and application such as quantum cryptography.
Quantum entanglement is a phenomenon by which a pair of particles, say photons, are allowed to exist in a shared state where they have complementary properties, such that by measuring the properties of one particle, you automatically know the properties of the other particle. This is true regardless of how far apart the two particles are transported.
There is an example of this from the classical domain. Imagine you have two balls, one black and one white. They are placed in identical boxes so that you do not know which box contains which coloured ball. One of the boxes is sent to Vienna and the other to Madurai. Just by opening the box they have received, the person in Vienna can know not only the colour of the ball they have but also that of the one in Madurai and vice versa. This is somewhat trivial because that’s all there’s to it is.
If the ball is a quantum mechanical particle, its colour is not known to the observer until he or she makes an observation of the ball.
So until the box is opened, the state of the ball inside is a superposition of black and white states. Like the absence of a well-defined trajectory described earlier, this is one of the features of quantum mechanics.
Entanglement is when the two balls occupy a shared state. So, however far the two balls may be transported, because of entanglement, opening one box can tell the user what the other ball’s colour is. Until one box is opened, the two balls may be in any colour.
But how is it possible to know that each ball did not have a set colour at the beginning? Perhaps there was some ‘hidden variable’ that instructed each ball which colour to take when the box was opened! How does one rule out such possibilities?
This is where the Bell’s inequalities come in. Bell’s inequalities are a theoretical insight that makes it possible to differentiate between two scenarios – one, that the indeterminacy of the colour of the balls is purely a quantum phenomenon, and two, that there are hidden variables that determine the colour when opened.
This year’s Nobel Prize was awarded to John Clauser and Alain Aspect for devising sophisticated experiments to test the above cases and establish, through Bell’s inequality, the existence of entanglement.
The third laureate Anton Zeilinger and his group used the phenomenon of entanglement to perform what is called quantum teleportation. This is a way of conveying information from one place to another without the actual transport of the material.
4) HM Amit Shah announces Scheduled Tribe status for Pahari community in J&K
Union Home Minister Amit Shah has announced Scheduled Tribe (ST) status for the Pahari community in Jammu and Kashmir.
5)’herSTART’
President Draupadi Murmu launches ‘herSTART’ – a start-up platform of Gujarat University for women entrepreneurs.
6) Credit Suisse crisis
Credit Suisse, one of the world’s oldest and historically most prominent banks, has seen its share price fall to an all-time low in recent days.
Credit Suisse’s share price has dropped by about 60% since the beginning of 2022. At the same time, credit default swap (CDS) spreads on Credit Suisse debt have reached a 14-year high, the largest since the 2008 global financial crisis.
These two trends have prompted many people, to wonder if Credit Suisse is about to fail in the same way that Lehman Brothers, an iconic American investment bank, did in 2008.
However, it has been losing its market value since the 2008 global financial crisis (see chart). The share price has witnessed almost a secular decline. The reason for this is fairly straightforward — Credit Suisse has made several risky bets and ended up losing a lot of investor money. That, in turn, has hurt its profitability, eroded investor confidence, and has made raising fresh capital costlier.
7) LCH – Prachand
THE Indian Air Force Monday formally inducted the indigenously developed multi-role Light Combat Helicopter (LCH), Prachand, which is suitable for operating in high-altitude battlefields, and capable of destroying enemy air defence and engaging in counter-insurgency operations.
LCH has the maximum take-off weight of 5.8 tonnes, maximum speed of 268 kilometers per hour, range of 550 kilometers, endurance of over three hours and service ceiling — the maximum density altitude to which it can fly — of 6.5 kilometres.
